. >> here's jay carney responding to the report in the book coming out tuesday. >> it's important to know that campaigns and pollsters as part of campaigns test a lot of things. what i can tell you without a doubt is that the president never considered that and had anyone brought that idea to him, he would have laughed it out of the room. joe biden has been an asset to this president in two campaigns and throughout five years of this administration. >> well, chris cillizza is an msnbc contributor. and michael scherer for "time" magazine. chris, i want you to first get in on this. there's one way to play it down. i guess that's what bill daly was doing. not denying it. the key is he accepted the fact of this book that there was a set of focus groups taken, there was money spent to try to decide whether to dump the vice president who was close to bill daly personally and close to the president. they were that worried that they conducted all this research to dump him. and then they decided after getting the research, not deciding ahead of time we love this guy. but after the research sa